Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Granola

It's the nearing the end of winter (according to the calendar). I've had a weird couple of months, but finally (as of this week) am possibly starting to feel normal again.

I made a delicious loaf of bread the other day out of sprouted whole wheat flour. It made me want to go and buy big sacks of wheat berries for sprouting. Which then made me thing of granola, something I'd been meaning to make but never gotten around to. It was surprisingly easy and definitely one of those things that is worth the effort to make yourself. I used rolled oats and rolled barley (3 cups of each). Once these had toasted in my large (12"? maybe bigger?) cast iron skillet for about 5-7 minutes (with occasional stirring to prevent burning)- until the grains were fragrant. I added 2 cups of a combination of chopped almonds, chopped cashews, poppy seeds, flax seed that I ground with cardomom seeds and sesame seeds and stirred those around. I then added maybe 1.5 teaspoons of cinnamon and a 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla. Finally, I added 1/2 cup of honey, stirred that as best I could (the heat helps) and then popped it into a 350° F oven for half an hour, occasionally opening it up and stirring. When that came out of the oven, all toasty and smelling heavenly, I added some raisins.

I had this with homemade almond milk (also worth it! so much better than that sweetened store stuff!)and felt, well, pretty granola. Well fed too, though.